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In February 2025, crypto exchange Bybit suffered the largest exchange hack in history when North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group exploited vulnerabilities in its cold wallet infrastructure, stealing $1.4 billion in digital assets. Three months later, the exchange is still tracking the stolen funds while working with bounty hunters to recover what they can.
Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou shared an executive summary on April 21 detailing the current status of the stolen assets. According to Zhou, 68.6% of the funds “remain traceable,” while 27.6% have “gone dark” and 3.8% have been frozen.
4.21.25 Executive Summary on Hacked Funds:
Total hacked funds of USD 1.4bn around 500k ETH. 68.57% remain traceable, 27.59% have gone dark, 3.84% have been frozen. The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers then through bridges to P2P and OTC platforms.
Recently, we have…
— Ben Zhou (@benbybit) April 21, 2025
The hackers have employed various mixing services to obscure the trail of stolen funds. “Recently, we have observed that the mixer mainly used by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] is Wasabi,” Zhou explained in his report.
After using the Wasabi mixer to launder Bitcoin, Zhou reports that “a small portion of it entered CryptoMixer, Tornado Cash, and Railgun.” About 944 Bitcoin (worth around $90 million) went through the Wasabi mixer.
The hackers didn’t stop there. They performed multiple crosschain swaps and conversions through platforms such as THORChain, eXch, Lombard, LI.FI, Stargate, and SunSwap before the funds eventually entered peer-to-peer (P2P) and over-the-counter (OTC) services.
The forensic analysis reveals that 432,748 Ether (ETH), representing 84.45% of the total stolen, has been transferred from Ethereum to Bitcoin via THORChain. Of that amount, about 342,975 ETH (worth approximately $960.33 million) has been converted into 10,003 BTC and spread across 35,772 wallets, with an average of 0.28 BTC per wallet.
Meanwhile, about 5,991 ETH (worth around $16.77 million) still remains on the Ethereum blockchain, distributed across 12,490 different wallets.
In response to the hack, Bybit launched the Lazarus Bounty program in February, offering a total of $140 million in rewards for information leading to the freezing of stolen funds.
According to Zhou’s update, the program has received 5,443 bounty reports over the past 60 days, but only 70 of these reports have been deemed valid. To date, Bybit has paid out $2.3 million to 12 different bounty hunters.
Most of these rewards went to a single entity, the Mantle layer-2 platform, whose efforts resulted in $42 million worth of funds being frozen.
“We welcome more reports, we need more bounty hunters that can decode mixers, as we need a lot of help there down the road,” Zhou said in his statement.
The Bybit hack aftermath has already led to changes in the crypto industry. On April 17, the eXch crypto exchange announced it would cease operations on May 1 after reports alleged the firm was used to launder funds from the Bybit hack.
Despite these efforts, approximately $380 million worth of the stolen crypto remains untraceable. The hackers’ tactics highlight the sophisticated methods used by the Lazarus Group, which has been linked to multiple high-profile crypto heists over the past several years.
The current status shows that while Bybit and its partners have made progress in tracking the stolen funds, recovering the full amount remains a challenge. As the situation develops, the exchange continues to work with bounty hunters and likely law enforcement to trace the remaining assets.
This case serves as a stark reminder of the security challenges facing crypto exchanges, even those with cold wallet infrastructure that is typically considered more secure than hot wallets connected to the internet.
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